1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for physical/logical relationship mapping between resources, and more particularly, to a method and an apparatus for defining at least one of components such as a device, a network, a service, a user, contents, etc., which may serve as one management unit as a resource and dynamically mapping a physical resource model to a logical resource model.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, with development of hardware and software technologies, various types of devices, networks, services, etc., have appeared. As a result, the number of resources that should be managed by people and computers has rapidly increased. In particular, there is a growing need to integrally manage resources in a domain, which are connected to a network per predetermined domain such as a home or a building.
Examples of known methods for the integrated management includes a method in which application programs having predetermined purposes such as security management, energy management, etc., directly access, monitor, and control individual resources or a method for accessing and controlling a logical resource corresponding to a physical resource.
However, the known methods do not provide a function to determine the relation between resources and has a limit in determining the relation between the resources in an application level. Therefore, the known methods are difficult to integrally and exquisitely manage resources. For example, when resources at a location where a predetermined resource is positioned needs to be controlled in batches, information on individual resources should be retrieved and found one by one in order to find the resources at the corresponding location. As another example, even when resources activated for a predetermined period need to be tracked, it is difficult to determine the resources.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,847,970 (U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/241,162) discloses a technology for providing an abstraction of a predetermined level for individual systems and computing a service/component dependency relation (components may be, for example, applications, middleware, hardware, device drivers, operating systems, and systems relating to a computing environment) related to an end-to-end service recognized by a customer, as a technology for managing a run time dependency relation between various components of a computing system. However, in this technology, judgment of existence of one or more relations in the computing environment may describe an entire lifecycle related to at least one component of the computing environment, but an integrated resource management function is not provided, thus, management convenience is not provided to a user, and the resources are not consistently and exquisitely managed.